PRO­TEC­TION EV­ERY­WHERE

We are all in­creas­ingly be­com­ing multi-de­vice per­son­al­i­ties. As we wait for that su­per de­vice that will fold all our smart­phones, tablets and com­put­ers into one, we keep on adding new de­vices into our dig­i­tal lives. The pro­lif­er­a­tion of th­ese de­vices is also in­creas­ing our ex­po­sure to the mul­ti­ple se­cu­rity threats out there. The scary part is that while we are very care­ful about pro­tect­ing our com­put­ers, we do not seem to be that se­ri­ous when it comes to our smart­phones, tablets and other con­nected de­vices which are also equally vul­ner­a­ble.

Nor­ton 360 Multi-de­vice is a unique so­lu­tion for this unique prob­lem of our times. This Nor­ton prod­uct comes in the form of a sin­gle li­cense to pro­tect up to five dif­fer­ent de­vices. And th­ese de­vices could be on plat­forms as di­verse as Win­dows, Mac OSx and An­droid. We tested the de­vice on a Win­dows 7 desk­top, a Win­dows 8 lap­top and an An­droid con­nected de­vice.

Nor­ton 360 pro­tects your de­vice against all kinds of threats, with­out ac­tu­ally slow­ing it up as we have no­ticed with many other such so­lu­tions. It was no sur­prise that the pro­gramme was able to de­tect and sani­tise all EICAR test files we tried to down­load. It also kept warn­ing us of sus­pi­cious web­sites that we tried to open. But you ex­pect a pre­mier Nor­ton pro­gramme to do this and much more.

Well, it does. If you are a Win­dows user, the pro­gramme will keep you PC tuned up re­mov­ing un­nec­es­sary files and also let you snoop into the on­line ac­tiv­i­ties of your kids. There is also a 25GB on­line backup. On an Adroid phone or tablet it lets you lock and wipe your de­vice in case it is stolen or lost. It also blocks spam mes­sages, which will be a big re­lief to most of us. It can also pro­tect your iOS de­vice.

But what the Nor­ton 360 Multi-de­vice really gives you is a dash­board to con­trol the se­cu­rity of all your de­vices run­ning the soft­ware. The man­age­ment tab in the soft­ware shows you all the de­vices run­ning the same li­cense and their cur­rent sta­tus. We could see all our three de­vices, though we could not do much more than since there was no threat there. It lets you in­stall Nor­ton pro­grams re­motely into th­ese de­vices. There is also a web con­sole which you can log and see the sta­tus of your de­vices.